Stay
by Lady Bracknell
Summary: Tonks wonders if it's remotely possible that Remus has just said what she thinks he has.


**Disclaimer: I'm not JK Rowling, so anything you recognise isn't mine. **

** Warning: I've rated this M for sex - although it's nothing too graphic. **

**Author's Note: This was originally written for rtchallenge on Live Journal, for the prompts: a picture of some battered suitcases, and first person, present tense. Feedback greatly appreciated for these shorter pieces. Oh, and happy Valentine's Day :). **

* * *

"Stay."

I wonder for a moment if it's remotely likely – possible, even – that he's just said what I think he has.

He notes my confusion, and says it again, but this time his voice is quieter, yet more imploring, and when I meet his eyes they're impossibly alive. "Stay, with me, tonight."

He steps closer, his hand on my arm and a rather cautiously hopeful expression on his face, but I'm still staring back at him with what I fancy must be utter bemusement, because one drunken, fumbled kiss on the doorstep two weeks ago and not a word since doesn't seem enough to have lead us here.

But I can't deny that the way he's looking at me makes my heart pound and my blood rush and rational thought seem nigh on impossible.

All night I thought, maybe, that he wanted to talk – his eyes continually darting in my direction, his sighs at how much Sirius was talking about the past more exasperated than usual – and when I declared I was going home, he sprang up and said he'd walk me out with unusual sprightliness. But I can't claim to have anticipated this.

"I can't stop thinking about you," he says.

The amusement in his eyes at the clichéd nature of his words does nothing to hide the longing in them, the desperation, and really it's too much to resist, because it's Remus, and I've pictured this moment a million different ways and lost countless nights and precious sleep to wondering if he has, too.

His fingers tighten on my arm, just a little, just enough so that I can feel that they have, and before I know what I'm doing my fingers are in his hair and his are on my back, and we've both tossed caution to the wind and our lips are pressed together. He pulls me closer, and I kiss him with every inch of me, offering him a couple of things I didn't know I possessed, and he kisses me back like I hold the very essence of his existence in my hands.

And it's very much more than a fumble on the doorstep this time, and we both feel it.

This is something we've both wanted for months, though neither of us has had the audacity to suggest it, the nerve to make it happen. Until now, when we're equally culpable.

He tastes of the Butterbeer he had earlier and smells of the ancient book he abandoned when I arrived, and I press him back against the wall and drink both in. His lips are insistent on my throat and send my insides into a tailspin, and when I slip my fingers underneath his shirt his skin is deliciously warm beneath them and I wonder if I'll ever be able to get enough.

Somehow we make it up the stairs, through the door to his bedroom.

Clothes disappear more rapidly than is dignified for either of us, and the world spirals away until we're the only things left.

We dissolve into nothing against each other, and yet it's everything, this sensation. The way he urgently bestows kisses on every inch of me he can reach makes me feel sexy, and wanted, like I'm the only thing he's ever truly desired, and it's so unbelievably heady I never want him to do anything else.

We fall onto the bed, his sheets crumpled and unmade beneath us, and lose ourselves entirely in each other.

The bed creaks beneath us, but we make enough noise to drown it out, I think, and later he jokes that Sirius is probably screaming blue murder and unfairly accusing the ghoul in the bathroom of giving him a headache.

He takes my face in his hands and kisses me softly, and laughs when I tell him I'm glad I stayed. He tells me he's glad too, that this wasn't exactly what he'd intended, that he'd thought to ask me out, maybe, but that when it came to it he'd had a better idea. He shifts beside me and kisses my temple, tells me, through a chuckle, that he's glad it panned out and I didn't slap him.

* * *

When I ask him to stay with me three months later, he just turns, picks up his suitcases, and tells me he has no choice, that he can't say no when Sirius and Emmeline have given their lives, and all Dumbledore is asking for is a part of his soul. 


End file.
